1975 Chevy Laguna Gets A Racing Spoiler- Spoiling For Fun!

Nothing says performance like a racing spoiler. We're not talking about the flimsy injection-molded ones on Hondas, but a real racing spoiler. Long before the import kids started bolting up kit spoilers, race car builders were fabbing the real things inside shops across the land. Stock cars and sports cars have had homebrew aero devices ever since airplanes were invented. These simple aerodynamic shapes were designed to do the opposite of a wing on an airplane: instead of taking flight, the wing pushes down on the car, increasing grip.

The nature of a car's shape creates lift the faster it goes. Aerodynamic forces increase with the square of the speed, so forces pile up rapidly on a race car. Each car's aerodynamic proclivities are different, so the amount of lift at the front and the rear needs to be countered to a different degree. That's why you see spoilers on both the front and rear of a race car, and it's also why you see spoilers with adjustable angles.

So does our '75 Laguna project car really need spoilers? Probably not. Even when we swap out our junkyard motor for the 560hp 408 small-block we've got waiting in the wings, we'll most likely not need wings to keep it on the ground. Still, you never know-we could always run Bonneville or the Silver State Classic with Project Talladega! We admit that we're shamelessly going for a NASCAR/Trans Am look. Even now, you don't see race-inspired spoilers on Pro Touring cars, so the look is refreshing.

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You can't just go on the internet and search for "stock car wings for '75 Laguna." You can't buy it off the shelf-you've got to build from scratch. We were flying blind, so we improvised. Starting with historical photos for reference, we noticed two things: The front spoilers of the day were only as wide as the grille opening (per NASCAR rules), and the rear spoilers did not extend to the edge of the quarter-panel like we remembered.

We immediately settled on ?-inch-thick aluminum sheet-a piece of scrap our waterjet guy had laying around. We designed cardboard templates first, mocking them up on the Laguna to check for style (and ground clearance). Once we established the shapes and had our waterjet guy cut them, it was a matter of attaching them securely. We ended up with a static spoiler on the front, and a nice adjustable one in the rear that uses hinges and threaded Heim joints. If for some reason you're crazy enough to have a Laguna needing spoilers, you can call Advanced Waterjet and order our designs-they're already on file.

We used scrap laying around for most of the rest, with the biggest exception being the outlay for the Heim joints. The rest of the materials were ordinary hardware store stuff. Our spoilers came out looking pro, and that's probably because we built ours the way a lot of race car shops built theirs back in the day. Ironically, today's newest NASCAR racers use a wing that most closely resembles those found on the Honda tuners we dislike so much. That's our cue to get back to basics! Check it out.

Special thanks go to Heath Elmer and Keith Kanak for helping us design, scavenge, and fabricate these one-of-a-kind spoilers. We'd also like to thank Advanced Waterjet for helping turn our vision into reality.